Scheler, Max

Scheler, Max

Max Scheler (1874-1928), German philosopher and sociologist, was born in Munich. His father came from an upper-middle-class Protestant family which can be traced to the sixteenth century; a number of his forebears had been clergymen and jurists in the city of Coburg. His mother was descended from a Jewish Orthodox family that had been settled in Franconia for many centuries. The clash of religious and cultural traditions in his home may account in part for the strains and tensions in his personality and work.

Scheler studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Jena. There, Rudolf Eucken, the Nobel prize-winning idealistic philosopher and defender of Protestant cultural liberalism, was his most prominent teacher. Scheler’s early work, beginning with his dissertation at Jena (1899), where he became a Privatdozent in 1901, clearly derived from Eucken. The distinctive aspects of Scheler’s thought became apparent only after he moved to the University of Munich in 1907. There he assimilated the phenomenological method: Franz Brentano, who had been Edmund Husserl’s teacher, continued to lecture there in Scheler’s day, and Scheler was also influenced by Husserl’s eminent disciples at the university. Although he was never an “orthodox” phenomenologist, his subsequent philosophizing moved within the orbit of Brentano’s and Husserl’s thought. [See the biography ofHusserl.]

In 1910 Scheler gave up his connection with the University of Munich and moved to Berlin to live as an academically unattached writer. His first major works were written in this Berlin period. Among his close intellectual companions in those days were Walther Rathenau and Werner Sombart. The outbreak of World War i marked a turning point in Scheler’s career. He threw himself with great ardor into the defense of the German cause. The articles and books in which he defended the “German war” with passionately nationalistic fervor brought him to the attention of a wider public than had noticed his more scholarly productions. In 1917 and 1918 he worked at various diplomatic and propagandist^ tasks for the German Foreign Office in Geneva and The Hague. During the war years Scheler, despite his intense nationalistic commitment to the “fatherland,” moved closer to a Christian position in the realm of ethics, becoming finally a Roman Catholic convert.

In 1919 Scheler accepted a call to the chair of philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne. During the next five years he gradually developed his sociology of knowledge. About 1924 he began slowly to turn away from his previous commitment to Catholicism and eventually left the church. He then began to work on a comprehensive Anthropologie, in which he attempted to expound a kind of vitalistic pantheism that he had come to adopt. But he was not able to develop this new conception fully. He accepted a call from the University of Frankfurt in the beginning of 1928, but he died on May 19, 1928, at the age of 54, before assuming his new post.

Quite different strands of thought were woven into the texture of Scheler’s thought at different times in his intellectual development. He was ever open to new ideas and did not fear to contradict himself. As a consequence, he failed to achieve a full synthesis of his thought but was able to appeal by virtue of his own intellectual restlessness to the restless young intellectuals of the postwar period. An erratic man, he was always to be a somewhat disturbing figure to the more settled members of the academic community while he gained considerable influence among younger sociologists and philosophers. Although he did not found a “school,” he was a major intellectual pathsetter in pre-Nazi Germany as a social critic and moralist and as a sociologist and philosopher. Since World War n the vogue of phenomenology and existentialism in France has led to vigorous interest there in Scheler’s work. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, Scheler was until recently little known, except among scholars interested in the sociology of knowledge or among certain theologians and philosophers. The recent translation of certain of his writings has stimulated wider interest among social scientists.

Work in social psychology. Scheler’s major contributions to the social sciences lie in the domain of social psychology and the sociology of knowledge. His first major work, Ressentiment (1912), contains a comprehensive phenomenological description of this sentiment as well as an attempt to locate the res sentiment—laden man within the social structure. He developed the notion that certain social roles—the spinster, the mother—in—law, the priest, for example—predispose their occupants to ressentiment, an attitude arising from a sense of impotence in the face of the cumulative repression of feelings of hatred, envy, and desire for revenge. In contrast to Nietzsche, who coined the term, Scheler located the breeding ground of res—sentiment in the modern bourgeois and post—bourgeois world rather than in Christianity.

In The Nature of Sympathy (1913), Scheler presented a detailed description of this feeling state. Here he wedded the phenomenological method to the Pascalian endeavor to outline a “logic of the heart.” Scheler attempted to uncover eternal uniformities in feelings and emotions and to show that these, far from being the blind results of mechanistically operating associations, are actually means of knowing which reveal, through their in—tentionality, the situation of man in the universe and the ethical a prioris of a distinct realm of eternal values. As in much of his later work, Scheler defended the thesis that values exist independently of the men who make the evaluations and justified his resolute opposition to all pragmatist, naturalist, or positivist theories of value. Polemics against such philosophical currents, more especially against Kantianism and Neo—Kantianism, form a major part of Scheler’s work. His Formal—ismus in der Ethik . . , first published in 1916 but written before the war (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2)contains the most elaborate development of his anti—Kantian polemics as well as ethical speculations and sociological considerations that anticipate many of his later sociological ideas. On the Eternal in Man (1921) is the fullest exposition of Scheler’s religious thought and also contains germs of his later sociological views.

The sociology of knowledge. Scheler’s contribution to the sociology of knowledge is to be found in his “Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens” (1924), two years later expanded in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8). He attempted to synthesize a Platonic doctrine of eternal immutability of a world of value essences with a comprehensive relativism. He described how different groups of men have striven, each in its socially and historically limited way, to grasp aspects of the eternal sphere of value essences. The infinite variety of subjective a prioris, the fact that different groups, or periods, or individual types elaborate their own forms of knowledge, meant to Scheler that men are striving to attain the value essences in different ways at different times rather than that the immutability of these very essences is limited. Real factors (such as biological, political, or economic constellations) favor or oppose the actualization of ideal factors (for example, moral, religious, or intellectual values), but they can never determine their content. They can only act as “sluice gates of the spirit.” Scheler rejected Comte’s “law of three stages” and stressed that religious, metaphysical, and scientific knowledge do not succeed each other in regular progression but rather coexist in every age, rooted though they are in the conditions of life of different groups of men and different human types. Yet Scheler found a grain of truth in Comte’s dogmatic assertion that there are stages in human history in the sense that in different periods different substructural elements determine the predominant cultural outlook of the age. At the dawn of history, “blood”that is, racial and vital factors chiefly controlled cultural life. After the emergence of the state, political factors moved to the foreground. With the bourgeois age, economic factors have achieved unquestioned predominance. While earlier periods accorded preeminence to religious and metaphysical types of knowledge, the bourgeois age is primarily the age of the scientist.

Scheler’s world view has a deeply aristocratic cast. The idea of hierarchy is central to it, and the equalitarian tendencies of the modern age were therefore deeply abhorrent to him. His doctrine of moral values is hierarchical: pleasure values, those concerning the pleasant or unpleasant, are inferior to vital values, those promoting well—being and health, while these are again inferior to spiritual values; the highest values, however, are of a religious or sacred character. To such a hierarchy of values corresponds a hierarchy of men representing them. The saint incarnates the sacred values at the very top of the hierarchy; the genius stands for the spiritual values; the hero stands for the vital values; even in the lowest world, that of pleasure, “artists of consumption” are needed to guide our uncertain taste.

To the hierarchy of values and of men embodying them there corresponds a hierarchy of forms of sociation. The lowest form is the simple horde, in which emotional contagion and unconscious imitation constitute the only bond. In the vital community, on the other hand, in the family or tribe as well as in classes or professions, conscious solidarity binds the participants. As against the horde, the social here prevails over the individual; each member can easily be substituted for any other. In the third type of sociation, Tonnies’ Gesellschaft, superficial contractual bonds between individuals replace supra—individual goals that are consciously supported. Finally, at the apex of the hierarchy, the Gesamtperson, the “complex collective personality,” represents a type of sociation in which a quintessential solidarity binds the members in a community of love. This last form, of which the church and the nation are central examples, is eminently superior to all others; within it alone can the higher values be realized.

To posit equality between persons and so to level essential differences of value was, to Scheler, the chief aberration of the modern age. His full—scale attack against the post—Christian world, his rejection of liberalism, altruism, humanitarianism, and democracy can best be understood as resulting from his conviction that the modern world with its leveling tendencies has undermined the objective hierarchy of men and values. His cultural criticism hence proceeds from a profoundly elitist point of view. The modern social scientist will of necessity have to sift Scheler’s very real contributions to sociology and social psychology from the antidemocratic ideology in which they are all too often embedded.

(1912) 1961 Ressentiment. Edited with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press. → First published as Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil. The second German edition appears on pages 33—147 of Volume 3 of Scheler’s Gesammelte Werke under the title “Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen."

(1913) 1954 The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath, with an introduction by Werner Stark. London: Routledge. → First published as Zur Phdnomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefiihle und von Liebe und Hass. The second German edition was published as Wesen und Formen der Sympathie.

(1921) 1961 On the Eternal in Man. Translated by Bernard Noble. New York: Harper. → First published as Vom Ewigen im Menschen.

Mannheim, Karl (1925) 1952 Sociology of Knowledge From the Standpoint of Modern Phenomenology (Max Scheler). Pages 154—179 in Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. — Contains a discussion of the differences between Mannheim’s and Scheler’s approaches to the sociology of knowledge. First published in German.

Stabk, Werner 1958 The Sociology of Knowledge: An Essay in Aid of a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas. London: Routledge; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.

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Scheler, Max

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

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Max Scheler (mäks shā´lər), 1874–1928, German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Jena (1901–7) and Munich (1907–10), where he was influenced by Franz Brentano and the followers of Edmund Husserl. From 1910 he concentrated on writing, but he returned to university teaching at Cologne and Frankfurt after World War I. Scheler was concerned with the permanent values in human personality and human action; this concern brought him to important work in phenomenology, which spread beyond Germany, chiefly through his influence. In his early thought, for which he is best known, Scheler taught that love is the great principle of human association, and he regarded God as the source of all love. His most basic work is Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (2 vol., 1913–16; tr. 1973); other important works include On the Eternal in Man (1921; tr. 1960) and Man's Place in Nature (1928; tr. 1961).

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Scheler, Max

Scheler, Max (1874–1928) Director of the Institute for Social Scientific Research and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cologne from 1919, Scheler was important in the development of phenomenology, the sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of culture. Under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl, Scheler attempted to avoid the relativism of the sociology of knowledge by adopting an essentialist view of human nature in his philosophical anthropology, which was also shaped by his own Roman Catholic beliefs. He recognized the plurality and relativism of belief systems but argued that human nature was universal. For Karl Marx's ‘base/superstructure’ metaphor Scheler substituted a ‘life/spirit’ dichotomy. He held a pessimistic view of modern industrial society, which he saw as a corruption of genuine values. His principal works were Ressentiment (1912), The Nature of Sympathy (1913), Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1926), and Man's Place in Nature (1928). Scheler's contribution to the sociology of knowledge has been unwarrantably neglected.

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